Myth

[T]he particular genre of story that tells you who you are, where you came from, and what you’re capable of, is mythology.

—Dorian Taylor

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (paraphrased)

A myth, in the good sense, is a story about who we are and what we ought to be doing. By "story" I do not mean necessarily a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, but a web of relationships between people, things, and concepts that is often too nonlinear to be fully explicated. A shared myth is an essential and perhaps inescapable part of any culture. Myths are how we orient ourselves relative to the world.

Examples:

For example, one myth of programming is that the programmer is an elite hacker/wizard who understands the machine so deeply that they can (and should) manipulate it into doing anything they want. This myth views programming as a discrete and solitary act. A program is written all at once, by one person, for perhaps only one machine; it is perfect at conception and is never revisited. The story of Mel is the earliest example of poetry I could find from this culture. The Demoscene is perhaps the material culture of an offshoot of this myth.

In the bad sense, a myth is a popularly believed falsehood, e.g. "the myth that unit tests prove correctness". There is some overlap between the senses. For example, I doubt whether the hacker/wizard myth of programming is realistic. Even in the days when single people did write monolithic programs for single machines, my impression is that it took a lot of thought and trial and error.

While perhaps not strictly correct, I will use the word mythology to denote the good sense of "myth".

Mythologies

ProgrammerMythologies